| Review: Roddy Doyle A STAR CALLED HENRY |
| It’s tough to write children well, too easy to
sentimentalize them or bring them off as small adults with a lisp.
Roddy Doyle has no such problem. His kids sound like kids, act like
kids, feel the way kids feel...or at least for the sake of A
Star Called Henry, the way kids scratching for survival amid
hardscrabble poverty and aching neglect in Dublin circa 1900, might
sound, act, and feel. A Star Called Henry has overtones of Homer or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bigger than life, it tells the story of a contemporary hero, a sort of Greek epic set in modern Dublin, with a foray into the magical realism of Latin American fiction. Henry Smart is a remarkably attractive and precocious infant, toddler, and child. There’s something magnetic about him. And magical. People see it. They want to touch Henry. They remember him. Low-born and poverty-stricken, he’s the anti-Odysseus. But like the Greek hero, he attracts women, events, trouble, and good luck in equal parts. Thanks to a handy manhole, he becomes an icon in the Irish Rebellion, his name hummed by thousands and cursed by those he fights. He spends three years on a bike, during which nothing—not winter, not summer, not guns can touch him. Because of him, the rebellion grows, learns, and then finally outdistances him. He loves many, but only one is his equal. He lives nowhere and everywhere. He is tricked and tricky. He’s betrayed and caught, half-killed, but doesn’t die. He endures. And all this before the age of twenty-one. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors left behind the humor of Doyle’s other novels—The Commitments and The Van—and concentrated instead on heartbreak. A Star Called Henry is something more. It attempts to encompass the pathos and the heart of the human spirit and, at the same time, prick the density of it all with its own absurdity. If there’s anything to complain about in A Star Called Henry, it’s that it may go on just a bit too long. But then, which of Odysseus’s travails would you cut?
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